Search form

Search form

Scientists were able to track the brain activity of a zebrafish that was injected with ultra-sensitive green fluorescent proteins. The researchers observed that the fish's activities corresponded accordingly with the flashes of light that traveled across its brain. Now, scientists are hoping to study the whole brain. "We will explore neurons that work while the fish learns and thinks," said one researcher. "This will lead to an understanding of the fundamental neuronal circuits at work during human thought."

Related Summaries

Researchers have created mice with half-human brains to help them study human brain diseases. "It's still a mouse brain, not a human brain. But all the non-neuronal cells are human," said University of Rochester Medical Center's Steve Goldman, an author of the study in Journal of Neuroscience. Testing shows that the mice with half-human brains are smarter than their whole-mouse-brained counterparts when it comes to memory and cognition.

A study found that humans generate brain cells throughout life and the process does not decrease with age, as previously thought. The study used the radioactive isotope carbon-14, released by nuclear bomb testing during the Cold War, to date the age of adult human brain cells by measuring the number of carbon-14 atoms in the brain regions of different populations. The study found that a subset of neurons in the hippocampus continually renews itself, and the team estimates that humans generate around 1,400 neurons every day.

Astronomers say they've discovered massive galaxies that may have produced stars as early as 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to study 26 star-making galaxies, which may be some of the oldest-known in the universe. "These types of galaxies, which are massive dusty galaxies that are forming stars -- these are the most active locations of star formation in the universe," said Joaquin Vieira, who led the study to be published in the journal Nature. "The peak in the massive galaxies' formation was a billion years sooner than thought." Additional findings on the research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists say they are one step closer to analyzing animal behavior by monitoring brain activity, following a recent experiment that involved tapping into the brainwaves of a zebrafish during feeding time. Researchers used a sensitive fluorescent probe to find the fish's neuronal activity down to the level of a single cell, noting fluctuations corresponding to its behavior. "Our work is the first to show brain activities in real time in an intact animal during that animal's natural behavior," said Koichi Kawakami of Japan's National Institute of Genetics.

Researchers injected zebrafish embryos with a gene that codes for a protein known to control the development of autopods -- primitive versions of hands and feet -- and found that those embryos developed autopods rather than fins. The fish already have the hoxd13 gene, but it produces small amounts of the protein; but when injected with extra copies taken from a mouse, the embryos grew autopods before dying days later.